They sat on a public bench as Dryden scribbled something onto his glass tablet. His writing was small enough she couldn’t read it without looking more obviously, so she had no idea if it was notes to burn onto paper later or a message to somebody.

“I’m sorry if I interfered with your interview,” Claire said once they were outside. Perhaps she should have waited to tell him after, but that might have made it harder to untangle his thoughts. Besides- she just couldn’t stand the feel of somebody in her head like that.

“Not at all. By the time it wore off, I could have forgotten any number of important details. Besides, the reaction of a person who just got caught is always telling. Could you tell what emotions he was trying to suppress?”

“Of course,” Claire said, trying to keep it from sounding like the brag it was. Emotional manipulation detection had been her first training ground, after all. “They weren’t trying to cause any positive emotions, mostly trying to suppress awareness and curiosity.”

Dryden frowned in thought.

“That matches my theory.”

“Are they suspects?” Claire asked. Really, it was two questions: ‘is there a chance they did it’ and ‘do we have the political capital to treat them as suspects’. They’d mentioned Dryden’s name. She’d have to look up exactly who his family was.

“I don’t think so. Even if I doubted their grief, which I don’t, I can’t see them putting him in commoners clothes and letting people find the body. Whatever they’re hiding, I think it’s about image. They might know how he died, or maybe it’s totally unrelated. Maybe Caspian had an illicit lover or an unfortunate hobby of some sort. Investigations can turn up all sorts of things. For now, Flora is our best chance. She seemed a lot more distressed, and less worried about appearances.”

“So are we going to see her?”

“No. We give her time to think, and we collect evidence. If it’s something that could hurt her family, she might need an extra push.”

“Should I return to the office?”

“No need. I sent the names of Caspian’s drinking buddies to Cam. We should have their addresses any minute. And you know what I bet they’ll know?”

“What, sir?”

“Absolutely nothing.” Dryden grinned. “In fact, I’d bet good money not a single one of them has gone drinking with Caspian Handfellow in weeks.”

----------------------------------------

Meeting Caspian’s drinking buddies turned out to be a good introduction to the Church District. Dryden narrated as they went, explaining which neighborhoods housed what flavor of riches and who the most important families were. Caspian’s group seemed to be the children of successful merchants with the exception of Hugh Montague, the grandson of a priest. The true power, Dryden told her, was mostly among the city and church officials.

Dryden’s prediction turned out to be right. Not a single young man described Caspian as anything other than a casual acquaintance they hadn’t seen for a bit. Eric Aldercy was proving a bit more helpful, but not because he was close to Caspian. The boy just happened to be a bit more loose lipped.

“Honestly, not to speak ill of the dead, but I think we were all kind of relieved when he stopped showing up for drinks.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Why is that?” Dryden asked, looking perfectly unbothered by Aldercy’s disrespect to the dead. Of course, good information was better than respect.

“No offense to the guy, nobody can say his heart wasn’t in the right place, but he was a bit of a buzzkill, you know? Couldn’t talk to girls at all, and would be breathing down the back of your neck to make sure you were ‘respectful’, barely drank, in bed by ten. I don’t know why he even went drinking with us. He never seemed like he was having any fun. Couldn’t take a joke to save his life. I mean, like I said, a good guy, but not somebody you want to go let loose with.”

“Do you know why he stopped showing up for drinks?”

“No idea. Most of us assumed he’d made some nerd friends at work and was spending time with them.”

“And can you think of any sort of trouble he might have gotten into?”

“Not really. Like I said, Cas was virtuous to a fault. He could have a bit of a temper though. One time Hugh was hitting on a girl and said… well, turned out it was Cas’ little sis’ and Cas laid him the fuck out. If you ask me, righteous little… Caspian probably got in over his head trying to defend some girl’s honor or something.”

They thanked Aldercy for his time and headed back to the government district to see the cartography studio where Caspain had been apprenticing.

The government offices Claire was used to were warm and cozy, decorated with rich woods and bright carpets, quiet as the scribes worked diligently at their desks. This place was an open plaza of marble, desks scattered about like islands, full of people chattering and comparing notes. To her left, they used glass sheets to trace hand drawn maps, then used a projector to burn the images onto multiple parchments, leaving the air smelling of magic and burnt paper. On her right, survey equipment was organized in labeled rows and a short man argued that a level had been damaged before he’d taken it out.

The noise of the place was irritating, but it was nice to be able to ask around without feeling like she was disturbing the office. After a few questions, they were quickly pointed to where Capsian had worked. The cartographers worked in a quieter corner of the office, a handful of people drawing careful lines and double checking data, but they were more than happy to talk when asked.

Aldercy’s assumption that Caspian was making friends at work turned out to be wrong. He was liked around the office, universally regarded as considerate and helpful, but much younger than his coworkers. They described him as a polite, diligent young man, but nobody had any particular connection with him. He ate at his desk, went home late, and never joined the others for drinks.

“He was a bit quiet at first. We were a bit worried, honestly. The poor kid was working himself to the bone. He was working so many hours that we got genuinely concerned for his health, but he settled out eventually. Beautiful work too. That’s his map there.”

The woman pointed to a map hanging on the wall. It showed the river that ran through the city in detail, the currents, the buildings at the banks, even the depth of the water.

“Impressive, right? He’d be out there at 4 AM with wading boots and a depth crystal. We said he didn’t need to get the depth measurements. He was supposed to just be updating an old tourist map, but he kept insisting this would be helpful. He was right too. They had to stop selling them as souvenirs to make sure there was enough for locals, not that it did Caspain any good. We’re paid by the project, not on sales.”

Caspian’s desk was neat, still laid out from his last day, pens cleaned and lined at the side. He’d been working on topographical maps, stacks and stacks of parchments to copy so it could be printed in different colors.

There were no personal effects, no captures of family or trinkets from a lover. The closest thing was the occasional drawings on his survey notes, mostly of animals or plants.

“He liked to spend his breaks sketching things he saw,” his co-worker said. “I told him if maps ever didn’t work out, he could go work for a biologist.”

She picked up a sheet of notes where a sparrow had been drawn in pencil, then covered with an ink list of coordinates.

“Find out who did this. None of us are sleeping easy, knowing somebody killed that boy and walked away.”